LAWN DAISIES

When I am feeling low, to lift my spirits I head for the garden – any garden — my vegetable garden, or this weekend, the square of earth surrounding a dogwood tree that might bloom pink any day now.  Around that tree, wild grasses, forget-me-nots, dandelions and escaped strawberry plants elbow for space around lavender and rosemary, even a large hydrangea we surrounded with seasonal bulbs for daffodils and tulips.  That square is a melting pot of chosen and undesired intruders that all stake their claim on an eight-by-eight-foot square that suffers intrusive saltwater damage in winter when high tides seep over our driftwood fence.

Last weekend, I carried a big orange bucket holding spades and clippers, plopped it alongside the wooden boards that separate the garden from our lawn and dropped to my knees to begin weeding.  My knees sunk into the soil, a rather soft landing that came to meet me in my sorrow.  I had taken with me feelings of despair following recent weeks of gun violence.  Despair would not let go its grip on my helpless heart.  Perhaps, unconsciously, I expected that spading and pulling out those weeds would lift me into hopefulness, the kind of hope that springs from an illusion of control.

How did my mother deal with sorrow? It was always clear when my mother was troubled.  I would find her on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor.  When she aged and housekeeping challenged her arthritic limbs, I offered to pay for a housekeeper to do that hard scrubbing.  She dismissed the housekeeper after one cleaning, because the woman used a mop at the end of a stick, refusing to get down on hands and knees.  I should have known, however, that the task was never about cleanliness.  It was keening, the kind of rhythmic movement made by Irish women when a death has occurred.   That back and forth, the reaching into corners with sore fingers, the scraping with fingernails a stubborn gooey blob under the kitchen table.  When my parents were not getting along, our kitchen floor was an advertisement for Aero Wax. 

What kind of humility, what kind of praying is the down-on-knees pulling of weeds?  I was not there to rescue the children.  I too was a teacher back when school shooting was so unheard of it would never reach my imagination.  I get down on my knees where I try to discern the weeds from the wildflowers, what to pull out, what to save, because even though self-seeded, the poppies are joyful orange and yellow, the foxglove a vibrant pink, and when clustered, they wave a snappy salute across the lawn. 

Today, while I am purging my grief with what are becoming sore fingers, I hear the familiar hum of the John Deere lawn mower.  Allan, perched like a prince on a dais, is riding around the yard cutting the rapidly growing grass.  I stop to watch him speeding around in circles or diagonals, clearly enjoying himself, little filaments of green flinging from under his machine.  He is headed toward a patch of small white daisies clustered mid-lawn.  “Lawn daisies,” I called them when I took my grandchildren to the park, and we found them salted across the park lawn.  So many, surely our picking a handful would not diminish their plenty.  We picked and we laced them together, making bracelets for small wrists.  Or we took one separately and plucked away –one white petal at a time, chanting “She/he loves me . . she/he loves me not” until we felt loved or rejected for one moment on a spring day.

I yell at Allan to stop, but he is wearing ear protectors.  I jump up from my weeding and race to the confident green mower just as it bore down on the circle of daisies. 

“Please,” I shout, circling the daisies in a protective dance.  He cannot see me, but understands he is to leave the flowers.  Perhaps they were his weeds in the lawn.  He stops, and the daisies live on now, white and fragile as remembrance.